Hey Bannermen! On Friday, we announced that we’re doing another phase of AvA next week - an announcement that many of you were concerned about, since it only provided four days of recovery time instead of the week we had in the old AvA.

This decision was driven by us wanting to get our AvA updates in front of you; there are a lot of good things going in Monday that we’re excited to have go live. Here’s a full list of what’s coming to AvA on Monday (Nov 16):

Rewards have been updated! Both Regional and Threshold Rewards are fully updated, and now give out Tokens (in addition to gold, resources, and other items). You won’t see them in-game until the new phase begins, but we’ll post the full list of rewards later this week. If you’re curious, Tokens are the items that let you build ....

AvA Epic Items! Ancient items of power, they include things like Bran the Builder’s Tools and Lann the Clever’s Knife. These items can only be obtained by ranking in AvA regions, and they’re powerful additions to your AvA arsenal. The recipes for these items won’t be shown until AvA begins, but we'll show off their art and stats in the rewards blog later this week.

AvA attack timers have been set to a 90 minute base time, and a 27 minute minimum time.

Alliance Challenges have been updated! They now take Brawl spoils.

Conversion recipes have been added to convert Skirmish spoils into Brawl spoils.

That obscuring timer icon has been moved for AvA actions.

Battle Log description has been updated.

Member VP is clearer now.

Plenty of other fixes around performance and backend changes to make AvA run even more smoothly.

Max, Kristen, and I discussed the schedule this weekend and we decided that, as much as we wanted to get our AvA updates in front of you this week, we didn’t give enough weight to the mental exhaustion that the Brawl phase caused in our most committed players. That’s on us - we should have thought about it and added some more time to the break. After running some ideas past Alliance players and leaders, we have decided to make the following changes:

We’ll delay AvA until next week. AvA will start next Monday (Nov 23), instead of Tuesday (Nov 17), to give our players ten days to prepare and recover.

We’ll make a final decision on next week’s length tomorrow (Monday), when we’re all back in the office. It will either be one week or two weeks, with the decision hinging on what’s best for design and balance.

For our mobile players: Apple approved our iOS build today (Sunday), so we’ll push that live for iOS players tomorrow (Monday) morning, when we’re in the office and can react to any issues that may come up. Our Android build is coming along and we anticipate testing and releasing it soon.

To answer some questions that came up over the weekend:

What about the Brawl phase differences between Trade actions and Battle / Intrigue actions?

One of the things new AvA does is it allows us to be extremely flexible in how we change AvA actions. Max has been going over all the data and discussion, and it’s likely we’ll have balance changes next week. What those changes could be, I’m going to leave to him and his posts! He’s very aware of the discussions and data, and he’ll be discussing it further on the forums.

What about the “final” length of AvA phases?

There was a good discussion sparked by players on the AvA Beta group. Players who have been with us for years remember when AvA was four weeks long, then three weeks long. We settled on two weeks because it was broadly considered by the community to be “best.” With a new AvA, it could be time to revisit this - or create a few different versions of AvA that we could run, like throwing in Brawl or Skirmish phases between more traditional phases. Max is interested and will be thinking about it more in the coming weeks.

If you’re going to be running AvA next week, isn’t that Thanksgiving, a major American holiday?

Yep. We have an on-call schedule we have set up for the holiday (after all, servers don’t sleep, and GoTA is an international game), and by starting on Monday we’ll have several days prior to the holiday to monitor for any issues. We were planning to have AvA run through the holiday when we were planning a two-week phase, so this doesn’t alter our on-call schedule. I may even welcome some time away from the family descending on my home!

Thanks to our players who have been providing clear and thoughtful feedback on the forums and Facebook - you guys are great! And thanks to all of our players who continue to play GoTA.